Deadlines and targets seem to be a feature of modern life. Perhaps they always were – even ‘back in the day’. As far as piano goes though, I’ve been a ‘piano deadline avoider’ since returning.
When I was working, it became an increasing feature of my industry to see deadlines get set that were frankly never going to be achieved. Whether ‘the management’ understood this and was simply trying to put people under bit of pressure is open for debate. Such deadlines were always justified by ‘we need to work smarter, not harder’ and other similar quotations from favourite productivity handbooks.
When deadlines can be counter productive
Yet, what generally happened was people were expected to work longer hours and weekends. The implication of course then being that it was their fault the deadline was in jeopardy, not that it was unrealistic in the first place.
As you might imagine, the majority of such deadlines were never met – even with all of this additional effort. This then led to a whole world of pain for all concerned.
I’m mentioning this not because I’m a grumpy old man (although I probably am), but rather because as a result, once freeing myself from such pointless pressure, I avoided setting myself any deadlines in my piano playing. That’s not to say that I don’t use goals. In fact, my home-built practice app is goal based. However, in my mind, achieving the goal would ‘take the time it takes’. To quote an old colleague, ‘you can’t go faster than the machine’.
Are we missing a trick?
However, I suspect I might have been somewhat short sighted here. I have to admit that the expression ‘the work expands to fit the time provided’ has a certain veracity to it too! I also saw this in my professional life. In truth, a ‘generous’ 4 weeks would be achieved in 4 weeks (not shorter). A ‘realistic’ 3 weeks would also be achieved in 3 weeks. However, an ‘unrealistic’ 2 weeks would probably take 5! I’m sure the same is true of piano practice!
What led me to this conclusion is that the only real semblance of a deadline that I’ve had as far as piano is concerned has been my desire to record pieces for my Facebook Page or YouTube Channel. Sometimes, I’d just wait until a piece is ‘ready’ – in which case I’d probably find I’d be working on it for months.
However, in the case of a Christmas piece, then I immediately have a ‘deadline’! When working on my Christmas piece for this year (Silent Night arranged by Derry Bertenshaw), as the deadline approached, I found that it would encourage me to both ‘work harder’, but also to really assess my daily practice sessions to see how I might improve them (‘work smarter’).
Working Smarter
Of course, finding out how to work ‘smarter’ takes time. It doesn’t generally happen when we are under tremendous pressure. Here we’ll just work harder because any time not spent ‘working on the task’ feels like time lost! This principle I think works when we have the time to think clearly about how to get smarter. We’ll work out what we think ‘smarter’ means and test it out. Often, it will prove to be not so smart at all and so we’ll go back to the drawing board.
Thus, I have come to the conclusion that we probably should have some degree of deadline setting in our piano practice. After all, to use another perhaps over-used quotation, ‘if it can’t be measured, it can’t be improved’. I’m sure it’s good to ‘stretch’ ourselves somewhat. However, we should also give ourselves sufficient time to solve the problems at hand (get smarter). If we don’t, we’ll likely fall into the blinkered mindset that we just need to ‘drill it’ more.
Such deadlines could, of course, be anything. We might ‘time box’ learning something and say that after this time box, we’ll record it and publish it – warts and all! We might choose to go down an exam route. There’s nothing like that looming exam date to focus the mind. To an extent, even a regular piano lesson gives us a target to work towards.
As with perhaps everything in life, balance tends to be what gets the best results!
